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Thursday, 17 October 2013

FamilySearch & DCT Family History form partnership

DC Thomson Family History (DCTFH)*, owners of FindMyPast, the British Newspaper Archives and more, has entered into a new partnership with Family Search that will give family historians access to billions of records online and new technology to allow researchers to share their discoveries.

According to the joint press release, more than 13 million records from FamilySearch launched today on FindMyPast, including collections of births, marriages and deaths from America, Australia, and Ireland.

It adds that around 600 additional collections, containing millions of records, will follow.

The two organisations have a long history of working together on historical projects, including the indexing of 132 million records from the 1940 US census and two hundred years of British Army Service Records (Chelsea Pensioners) in a joint digitisation project with The National Archives.

Making the announcement, CEO Annelies Van den Belt said: 'This is fantastic news for our customers all over the world. As a leader in online family history we will be able to offer access to a much wider variety of records dating back hundreds of years, and the first batch are ready to search on FindMyPast. The convenience of searching many treasures from FamilySearch.org along with our own extensive collections will provide rich new insights for our customers.

'This partnership with FamilySearch will accelerate the momentum of our next phase of global growth into new non-English-speaking markets and give more people more access to more records to uncover their family history. This really cements our position as a market leader.'

Although the above press release suggests that Irish records have been released today under the new partnership, I cannot find any details. In response to a subscriber request via the Comment section of the FindMyPast UK blog, the marketing manager provided a list of the first releases: Californian marriages 1850-1945, Iowa marriages 1809-1992, Indiana marriages 1780-1992, Virginia marriages 1785-1940, Alabama marriages 1816-1957, Alabama deaths 1908-1974, Utah births 1892-1941, North Carolina deaths 1931-1994, Indiana births 1773-1933, California births 1812-1988, Australian births 1792-1981, Australian deaths 1816-1980, Australian marriages 1810-1980. No mention of Irish records. I'll try to get details tomorrow at Back To Our Past.

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Welcome to Irish Genealogy News

Irish genealogy research is famous for being difficult, if not impossible. This reputation isn't entirely deserved, although there can be some fundamental difficulties in discovering your Irish ancestry, particularly if you don't know where your ancestors lived. That's why I launched my website, Irish Genealogy Toolkit. It's a free online guide to Irish family history research, and it's designed to helpyou to find your heritage.

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